NHL Puck Ditties – The Dan Ellis saga

(As we noted earlier, we’ll often take looks and give takes on other topics around the NHL here. Today brings a new installment).

Tampa Bay Lightning goalie Dan Ellis took his twitter account and went home today. Here is a briefing of the matter. If you want to skip the briefing, it can be boiled down to: Ellis tweeted some thoughts about the life of a pro athlete, especially when it comes to money. He basically said money can’t make you happy, and that he worries more about money than he ever did. He also said playing goalie is a specialized craft, like a heart surgeon is a specialized craft.

While we might have thought that last analogy was a bit unfortunate, we here applauded Ellis’ insights about money, and his honesty – no matter how little of the population (me included) can relate.

Of course, this brought the predictable tsk-tsk torrents from the arbiters of morality and good taste. The thought police came down hard on poor Ellis, to the point where it became a local story in Tampa, whose conclusion came today with Ellis’ cyber-sayanora.

Two points:
1. The thought policers just naturally assume having money in life guarantees a happy, financially worry-free life. Well, here was a guy saying that isn’t necessarily the case. Honest perspective from a corner of the world most can’t relate was simply that – perspective from a part of that world.

But the thought policers would have none of it, donning their high horses and launching their sermons once fully mounted. The snarky (yet admittedly funny at times) twitter hashtag #danellisproblems quickly became the platform for further mockery.

We saw honesty from Ellis’ tweets, the insight into the mind of a person with a different set of circumstances than most of us. The thought police saw the chance for a heapin’ helpin’ of some self-righteous piety, and dig right in they did (always remembering to prominently display their outrage for a couple days with ginned up SEO metadata to get that high google page rank).

2. Enjoy even less insight now from NHL players, thought policers. Enjoy more “We just gotta come out with our best effort and get the two points”, “We just gotta keep our shifts short”, “We gotta go back to basics, keep things simple” insight. After this, guaranteed there will now be a “Cautionary Tale: The Dan Ellis Incident” extra couple minutes to the annual briefing teams give their players when it comes to dealing the media.

We can’t wait for when the hockey media thought-policers get their knickers in a twist over the fact that “Players are so boring! They never say anything! They never say what’s really on their minds! Woe is us!”

When that happens, and it will, we can look back at the Dan Ellis Twitter saga as part of the reason why, and will learn yet again: Can’t have it both ways.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I once took my Twitter account and stomped off, full of self pity and moral outrage at being attacked over a tweet made over a shouting match involving Dion Phaneuf, overhead from the Calgary dressing room (all of which proved true, I might add, unless you believe Dion’s subsequent trade to Toronto had nothing to do with any possible chemistry problems between player and coach/team. That said, I’d probably handle the matter a little differently if such an incident crops up again. It was a little too rush-rush, instantaneous, which is both Twitter’s appeal to much of the media and its constant cautionary warning).

I hope Ellis reconsiders and comes back to twitter-ville, as I soon did (and as anybody who remotely knows me at all knew I would).

He also said: “The amount of $ cash has very different problems associated with each amt. No better no worse but different”.

The millionaire who says to the guy struggling to feed his family’s that those problems are “no worse” than his is bound to face some backlash.

Why you are portraying him as some kind of victim is beyond me.

Fols

No…of course it had nothing to do with chemistry Dater! Your off the hook, Calgary is much better for that trade and playing out the year as the junior Maple Leafs. In fact, I would encourage Calgary to take on all of Toronto’s rejects.

Legsamilelong

ANOTHER uptight one here! No matter who has how much money, they ALL have problems. Maybe the rich guy can’t serve caviar to his family tonight. To him that;s as bad as a homeless mother trying to find food to feed her child that day. Don’t look so far into it. Bottom line is EVERYONE has their problems no matter what their bank account has in it.

http://www.downgoesbrown.com Down Goes Brown

I’m not buying your premise. Ellis has every right to say what he wants — even something as tone-deaf and poorly thought-out as he did. Likewise, anyone who read it has the right to fire back. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

If he wants to broadcast his thoughts without any interaction or response, there are plenty of platforms available for him to do that. He chose one that allows for instant feedback, and he got it.

And let’s be real — for the online world, what Ellis got was a slap on the wrist. Mostly good-natured attempts at humor, a few weak personal attacks, and a short-lived meme in his honor. That’s it. If he had waited a day it would have all blown over. Or he could have engaged back semi-intelligently and won over 90% of the crowd with a few tweets.

Instead, somebody got nervouse and wrote him an over-wrough apology to post. The online world didn’t drive Ellis off Twitter. An overly jumpy PR flack did. Aim your “thought police” accusations in their direction.

Legsamilelong

Thank you for portraying the Dan Ellis situation with an open mind, as so many others have and are. Because of a handful of ignorant and/or uptight and overly sensitive people, the sincere followers have lost a very valuable insight in the game of hockey. Not only is Dan a goaltender, he is a dad and a husband. Because of Twitter, we have all gotten to know and love him very quickly in Tampa Bay.From a coffee place being out of coffee to his training sessions, etc he shared it all. That is something that a 30 minute behind the scenes type of show could never provide! He considers his job a “specialized craft” because it is just that.You can’t take a center and throw in between the pipes. Not just anyone can be a goaltender. It takes someone and something very special to fill that space. The brain surgeon analogy is referred to because that is what his brother does.
So, thank you, to all of those that just couldn’t take Dan’s simple suggestion; if you were too uptight for his humor. All you had to do was UNFOLLOW and none of this garbage would be going on today! After all, if he’s such a pompous jerk, WHY would you want to follow him anymore anyway?!?!?!

Adrian

I agree with that to a point. Nobody struggling to feed their family wants to hear the money woes of a pro athlete. But I’m saying I still want to hear his money problems, different as they are from the guy struggling. I don’t want to bully him into silence.

Legsamilelong

Right on! I’m nowhere close to being rich, but hearing that the rich have troubles too kinda makes it ok. Just proves that money isn’t everything!

Legsamilelong

The biggest crime committed was the apologies. One quick “sorry if I offended anyone” and move along. The complainers would have gotten bored if they didn’t get a response out of him at all.

Nhawker

Great response!

Meg

Right, wrong, or indifferent, Down Goes Brown has a point. He chose to put his thoughts out on a social media outlet that encourages instantaneous feedback. And he tweeted about a sore subject to a lot of people. Yes, the rich and famous have money worries, too, I don’t think anyone is saying those worries are illegitimate.

But you’re going to rub people the wrong way with ill-thought out comments like his. It ran its course for a day or two and now everyone, including you, need to move on from it because now it’s just adding fuel to the fire.

Personally, I’d take Biz Nasty’s tweets over Ellis’s any day.

Jen

In my opinion, Dan Ellis got what was truly BEST for him to get out of this situation, and yet instead of learning the real lesson, he took his puck and went home.

He tweeted that he was “more worried about money now than (he) was in college.” Just a month and a half after tweeting about buying a luxury car.

What Dan Ellis needed, as a human being, at that moment in time was some perspective. He received it. He didn’t like it maybe, because who really likes to be told they’re being a jerk? Who likes to be confronted with the idea that perhaps they’ve lost some of that grounding they used to have growing up in Saskatoon?

We ALL need to be smacked a bit when we lose perspective– it’s why my nephew was taken by his mother to a homeless shelter one week after Christmas this year after he complained that he “only” got an ipod, a laptop and almost a whole new wardrobe.

The difference is my nephew made that comment to his mother, and it was his mother who brought him back to reality. Dan Ellis made his comments to the Twitterverse, and they responded accordingly.

Drew

Jen that was the best post regarding this whole situation that I have ever read.

JordanHansen

Thought Police? That’s an insult to Orwell.

I like the low blows to the blogosphere, however. I also dig self-righteous pseudo-piety when it attacks self-righteous piety. Great stuff Dater.

http://twitter.com/lethargicj Jason Castleman

Thank you Mr Dater for having some common sense on this issue.

I find it very amusing that this Ellis story and the story about Jason Smith possibly beating his wife and daughter came out at roughly the same time. The hall monitors of the blogosphere have jumped all over Ellis and turned him into the spawn of Satan, while they’ve mostly ignored the Smith story.

As far as Ellis getting what he deserved. Absolutely everybody is free to disagree with Ellis, the problem is that that wasn’t good enough for a vocal minority who instead of disagreeing or ignoring him decided they wanted his head on a stick. They demanded his team and the league step in and stop him, they went so far as to contact the Lightning. THAT is the problem and it’s a problem that goes much deeper than Dan Ellis. We’ve become a nation of sissies and tattle tales who can’t handle being offended without demanding whoever offended them be silenced and banned. It’s sickening.

I personally disagreed with a lot of what Ellis said, that doesn’t stop me from appreciating his being open and honest for the world to see.

Terry Frei graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in the Denver area and has degrees in history and journalism from the University of Colorado-Boulder. He worked for the Rocky Mountain News while attending CU and joined the Post staff after graduation. He has also worked at the Oregonian in Portland, Ore., and The Sporting News. His seventh book, March 1939: Before the Madness, was issued in February 2014.

Chambers covers college and professional hockey for The Denver Post. He has written for the Post since 1994, after dumping his first 9-to-5 office job a couple years out of college. He primarily follows the University of Denver hockey team and helps cover the Avalanche.